For people who are hunting down success, one important question should be asked: are you happy right now? People who are choosing to be consistently happy are also the people who generally find greater success in life! It isn’t about being lucky all the time or having more opportunities than others may have. It’s about taking your opportunities, working hard to create a successful environment using all of your tools, and allowing yourself to be happy no matter the outcome.

Are you ready to choose happiness… and ultimately choose success?

Take Care of Yourself Every Single Day

One of the core components of finding success is to take care of the problems that other people are facing. In order to take care of the problems that others are facing, however, you must also be willing to take time for yourself every day. There are a number of ways that you can take some time out of the day to take care of yourself:

take time to exercise every day,

give yourself 20 – 30 minutes of solitary time so you can meditate, or

develop healthy habits that pull you toward successful outcomes.

Just as someone can be pulled into eating sweets because they taste good and that makes them feel good, someone can also be pulled into healthy habits because they do the same thing. By taking care of yourself better, you’ll be in a better position to do more, to help more, and that’s what brings success!

Get Into a Consistent Daily Wake-Up Routine

When the weekend arrives, it can be extremely tempting to just sleep in for awhile because there are no responsibilities that are demanding to be met. Yet people who have a consistent daily wake-up routine that they use every day are actually happier and more successful. Why is that? Because it comes down to what we just discussed – taking care of yourself. When you feel fresh and focused in the morning, you’re ready to attack the day. When you don’t, you’re defending against the day.

Take Time To Disengage From the Day

Just as a morning routine that is consistent is important, an evening routine is as well. Being able to process the events of the day and to then disengage from them can help to quiet a racing mind, calm the thoughts, and ultimately bring about a deeper, more refreshing sleep. There are a number of different ways to disengage, but what you decide to do must be comfortable and familiar enough to you that it can help your mind sort through any bothersome thoughts or emotions during that time. It could be a walk, a familiar television show, or a few minutes of mindfulness meditation – if it works for you, then make the choice to do it!

Choosing success and happiness might be something that needs to be done every day, but as with any good habit, once you establish it, the habit will pull you toward it. Begin that process now so that you can experience the happiness and success that you want in life!

Have you ever noticed how people have stopped asking for help? It is uncommon to ask for help in many aspects of life, but it has become exceedingly rare at work. Even for those who work in a dedicated team environment, the concept of asking for help has become restricted, or taboo, because it has become an indication of failure.

What if you could turn that perception around and actually find the right way to ask for help when you might need it? Here are some helpful ways that you could ask for help at work without making it seem like you’re useless:

#1: Try Everything Before Asking For Help

The reason why asking for help is considered a black mark of failure is because too many people ask for help before they truly need it. The concept of “getting help” is that you’ve already taken on your part of the responsibilities required and have tried or looked at every possible solution. All it takes is for someone to say, “Why didn’t you try [fill in the blank]?” to have your reputation shot. You don’t have to use a sledgehammer to break down a door all the time… sometimes the door is already open.

#2: Know Your Limits

A friend of mine once posted on his Facebook page that he loved being a martyr. It was, in fact, his plan to go martyr himself for his business because that would be the easiest way to get things off the ground. That way everything would be done according to his vision… guaranteed.

It’s good to have a vision and it’s good to work hard, but know what your limits are. If you’re working 90 hours per week on a project and everyone else is working half that time, then it might be time to look around and ask for a little help. You’ll actually be seen as more of a success in asking for help in these circumstances than if you decide to take on everything and then complain about it.

#3: Be Specific About Your Needs

One of the most frustrating things for a manager is to have one of their direct reports sit in their office and completely surrender a project. Rather than just give up, bring your solutions to the discussion. Talk about what has worked, what hasn’t worked so far, and specifically why you feel the need to seek out help at this time. By talking about these options, there’s a good chance that your desire to surrender will become a brainstorming session that helps you find that one missing piece of data that has been driving you crazy.

The way you ask for help will define you more than the actual need for help in almost every circumstance. Turn what might be perceived as your greatest weakness into your greatest success by asking for help in the right way! Don’t expect a hand out… but do expect the chance to collaborate so that together, any task can become a little bit easier to complete.

People gravitate towards people who have the most knowledge within their field. It’s just simple common sense, right? If you’ve got a problem, you want the smartest person you can find to be able to help you find a solution that works. You don’t have to be a genius to be able to become a niche expert – you’ve just got to be willing to put in the work to truly understand your niche. When you can do that, you can provide a better value to people and that’s ultimately what people want: value.

Are you looking to become a niche expert in your field? Then you don’t need a doctoral degree and a bunch of initials after your name. Just follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to being seen as a world expert in your niche.

Tip #1: Start With a Higher Level of Discipline

It takes nearly 2,000 reading hours for someone to attain a doctoral agree. That equates to about one hour of reading per day about your particular subject. Increasing your knowledge base is critical to becoming a niche expert, which means you’ve got to do research! Putting time into your busy day to read will help you accomplish this. Even if you can’t set aside a full one-hour block, you could try setting aside four 15 minute blocks.

Tip #2: Make Learning a Habit

It takes about three weeks of doing the same thing every day in order to make an action become a habit. Whatever blocks of time you set aside to read, research, and study, make sure that you are setting aside the same blocks of time every day. This will help to develop your reading time as a habit! After the first couple weeks of doing this, it will actually become harder for a few days to make the time to study. If you can push through during the tough choices, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a niche expert.

Tip #3: Allow Yourself To Succeed

One of the biggest factors that prevent personal success is a personal viewpoint that has already pre-determined that there won’t be any success whatsoever! When people don’t feel like they can succeed, that viewpoint becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if that person has the skills and opportunity to find success!

Don’t let negative self-talk affect you as you work toward becoming a niche expert. It’s not about your intelligence: it’s about your inner strength and willpower. You must have the will to succeed! If you can maintain that strength, you’ll become a niche expert – plain and simple.

Are You Ready To Get Started?

All it takes to become a niche expert is a level of dedication and focus toward the goal of learning more about your chosen field than anyone else. If you’re willing to put in the work and can make positive decisions toward meeting your goal of becoming an expert, then you’ll be able to find that success you want. It might seem easy to do on paper… but unless you can drive yourself toward that goal, it’s much, much harder than people think.

It can be extremely discouraging to not get a promotion that you felt was deserved. You’ve worked hard, done everything that you’ve ever been asked to do, and maybe even sacrificed countless nights for work that you could’ve spent with your family. Unfortunately hard work, dedication, and loyalty just aren’t enough for many employers to grant a promotion in the modern workplace. They’re looking for something more.

Here are the five primary reasons why workers don’t get a promotion that they’re expecting to get. Take these reasons and apply them to your unique situation to see what you could improve so that the next time a promotion comes around, you can quickly secure it!

Reason #1: No Apparent Leadership Skills

Quality leadership comes in three forms and all three must be present:

You need to be able to inspire others to do an incredible job at every task they’re assigned.

You need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and work on a project at a moment’s notice.

You need to be ok with the fact that you might fail.

You might be a hard worker and do an incredible job, but that’s just one-third of what most employers want to see in their leaders. Are you scared to fail? Do you tend to just do your job and never help anyone else? Do you sit quietly at your desk instead of inspiring your co-workers onto bigger and better things? These traits could help you get your job done effectively, but won’t play well with a promotion attempt.

Reason #2: You’re Disorganized

To be fair, everyone has their own filing system that works well for them. Whether you organize in “piles” or “folders,” you’ve got to be able to find stuff at a moment’s notice. An employer doesn’t usually care if your filing system is messy or neat and tidy, but it does have to be organized. If you won’t organize your work, chances are you’re going to miss deadlines, and that’s not something an employer will offer a promotion for doing.

Reason #3: You Don’t Defend Yourself

It might seem a bit narcissistic, but you’ve got to make sure that your employer knows how much value you bring to the table. That doesn’t mean you go and try to solicit another offer from a similar employer and then blackmail yourself into a promotion! It means you vocally demonstrate how much work you do compared to your co-workers. You provide evidence that your work is always of the highest quality. If you provide the right data, the chances are better that you’ll get that promotion the next time around.

Reason #4: You Didn’t Declare Your Intentions

One of the biggest reasons why people are passed over for a promotion is because they never applied for one or vocalized their intent to step-up in the organization. You can’t just assume that your employer knows you want more responsibilities! Go in with the assumption that your employer knows nothing about you, tell them what you want, and then use Reason #3 and provide the evidence that you are a valuable commodity.

Reason #5: You’ve Burned Bridges

The attitude that you bring to work gets noticed every single day. If your attitude is consistently negative or viewed as negative, then you won’t get that promotion you want because employers want leaders with a positive outlook. If you throw managers or co-workers under the bus, this will work against you as well.

Having a positive reputation in your local office politics will go a long ways toward securing any promotion. Use this article to make any changes you might need to make so that you can get the promotion you want the next time around!

It’s true that every woman has their own definition of success. Despite these varying definitions, however, there is some common ground that every successful woman has. These traits are something that almost every successful woman has in some form and it fuels their desire to find the success they want to achieve. From the stay-at-home mom to the successful CEO, here are what today’s successful women have.

1. Have a Passion for What They Do

It can seem difficult to be passionate about cleaning up the kid’s bedroom for the second time in a single day, but it can also seem difficult to be passionate about a day full of meetings. In order to truly find success, you must have an burning passion that allows you to proceed through the daily chores and responsibilities that can lead to that success. Without a passion for something, most women end up abandoning what they are doing in favor of something that is more in line with their desires. That’s why household chores or lengthy meetings aren’t so bad… because the effort put forth is pleasurable.

2. Don’t Expect Perfection

Humans are fallible creatures. That fallibility makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be perfect 100% of the time. It’s easy to get caught up in the trap that in order to be successful, a perfect level of success must be achieved. Successful women don’t expect perfection from themselves or others. What they do expect is the best effort that can be put forth because if perfection is missed, then what is experienced is failure instead of success.

3. Believe They’ll Be Successful

Becoming successful truly is a choice that can be made. Just as you can choose to be happy and then find things that make you happy, you’ll choose things that will make you successful when you choose success. The decision-making process really is the model of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you set the bar low, you’ll achieve little. If you set the bar high, you’ll always find more success.

4. Willing To Take Risks

In the book of Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of three servants who are given money. One gets five bags of gold, one gets two bags of gold, and the third gets just one bag. Two of the servants are willing to take risks with the money of their master and end up doubling the money they were given. The third servant, however, takes no risks and buries the money in the ground. In order to find success, risks must be taken so that forward steps may be taken. If you are unwilling to take a risk, all you’ll ever have is what you’ve managed to bury in the ground somewhere.

5. Recognize That Failure Is Part of the Process

In order to find success, a risk of failure must be taken as well. Rather than it being the opposite of success, however, failure is simply another step toward success. J.K Rowling had manuscripts rejected over a dozen times before someone was willing to take a risk to publish her work. If she had simply given up, there wouldn’t be the massive Harry Potter franchise there is today.

Success can be had, but only if you’re willing to have it. Incorporate these traits into your life as best you can and you may just see that the success you’ve been wanting is waiting for you, right around the corner. Go grab it today!

It’s often been said that we are what we eat, but a more accurate portrayal of this saying is that we are what we think. The mind has a unique ability to create the environments that allow each person to succeed or fail based on their own self-perception. If, for example, you often talk to yourself about why you made such a bad decision, then you’ll unconsciously set up the circumstances to continue making bad decisions until it becomes a habit. Instead of creating a downward spiral of negative self-talk when it comes to achieving a goal, what could positive affirmations about your confidence and ability to continually strive forward do for your life?

What Do You Give Yourself Permission To Do?

One of the biggest struggles that each person faces in life is giving themselves permission to be successful. It’s understandable, after all: there are people in this world who are struggling to find their next meal while others are struggling to cope with a little negative self-talk that sets them back from a goal. Just because it is understandable, however, doesn’t make it the right course of action to take. You must give yourself permission to be successful and you must be able to tell yourself that you can be successful, no matter what influence may try to drag you down.

It’s All About Reconditioning the Brain

The human brain is a creature of habit. Because of this, it likes routines. It likes to do the same thing over and over and over again. You can take advantage of this be reconditioning your brain to focus on the positive affirmations that you think about yourself! If you can consistently tell yourself that you will be confident in social situations and that you will be a successful entrepreneur, then your mind will begin to change the way it thinks about social situations and will look for opportunities where your entrepreneurism can become successful. This doesn’t happen, however, unless you put a little work into the process.

How Can You Make Your Mind Work For You?

What you’ve got to do is create your new vision of reality. It doesn’t have to be something extravagant, like becoming the CEO of a multi-million dollar company. It should be something achievable, like wanting to make more money in your own business venture. From there, create stimuli that will help you focus on this goal. This could include:

visual representations of what you’re thinking,

daily meditation, or

self-guided images, like mental movies, that help you visualize the goal you wish to achieve.

The more time you can dedicate to this process, the better the likelihood of success you’ll have. Plan on taking at least 3 weeks to really begin transforming your mental state.

What Could Positive Affirmations Do For Your Life?

The only way to find out if you could achieve your life goals in a simpler, easier way through positive affirmations is to just do it. Many people find that a simple shift in attitude or perspective is really all it takes to be able to create the environment they need for success. Take the time to begin the process today and see how quickly your goals might become a reality too!